AGI

Society, Culture & Politics

The AGI Society, Culture & Politics Program focuses on crucial topics within the German-American dialogue, including: demographic change, migration/integration, and aging societies; electoral politics at the national, state, and European levels, and comparative analysis of Germany and the United States; diversity within Germany, Europe, and the United States; the politics of collective memory and identity, Holocaust remembrance and reconciliation, and shifting conceptions of national identity that shape perspectives and policy responses.
Reset

Working Against Mental Shortcuts: Learning to Value Different and Complex World Views

“This is how the Americans truly are…” is a sentence we keep hearing in Germany these days. We keep trying to summarize people from or living in certain countries as …

Standing United: The Women’s March on Washington

President Donald Trump’s sexist remarks made during the 2016 campaign, such as calling a former Miss Universe winner “Miss Piggy” or alluding to a female reporter’s menstrual cycle, have caused …

Despite Trump, Germany Should Not Fall for “Equidistance”

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States has sent shockwaves through Berlin. Among others, Trump’s sympathetic gestures toward Russia put Germany in an awkward …

Danke Kamera! How Germany Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Video Surveillance

On October 27 at a subway station in the Berlin hipster neighborhood of Neukölln, a group of young men walked aggressively past a young woman slowly making her way down …

Trump’s Potential Upheaval to Israel Policy

On December 15, 2016, President-elect Donald J. Trump nominated his former bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. The prospective appointment reiterates for the nth time …

Thinking Through the Future of Memory

Report for the Inaugural Conference of the Memory Studies Association, 3-5 December 2016, Amsterdam As part of AGI’s work on reconciliation, we are pleased to present readers with a report …

The Power of the Young?

Populist parties and governments have gained in popularity in many countries across the world in recent months. Their success is in part based on citizens’ fear of globalization, immigrants, loss …

The Rise of Populism in the U.S. and in Germany

A significant segment of the U.S. remains in shock over the results of its presidential election. Donald Trump is now the president-elect. Among politicians, media pundits, academics, pollsters, and private …

Different Approaches to War Crime and Memory in Germany and Japan since 1980

Seventy Years after World War II, How Should We Remember? Seventy years have passed since the end of World War II, and people in Germany and around the world are …

Wait and See: Advice for European Policymakers

Wait and see. That is the best advice I can give to German and European policymakers regarding the forthcoming presidency of Donald Trump. Trump’s misogynist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and lie-ridden campaign …

The Voices from Below: Who is Civil Society?

In its most basic sense, civil society is an analytical concept denoting a domain of collective life above the individual but below the state, in which people voluntarily come together …

Reconciliation Over the Graves? A German War Cemetery in Russia (or the German-Russian Reconciliation of Sologubovka)

The remains of millions of soldiers still lie in the soil of the former battlefields of World War II in Europe. Since the end of the war, Red Army and …